Agnes Denes rose to international attention in the 1960s and 1970s as a leading figure in conceptual, environmental, and ecological art. A pioneer of several art movements, she creates work in a broad range of mediums, utilizing various disciplines—science, philosophy, linguistics, ecology, psychology—to analyze, document, and ultimately aid humanity. Denes turns her analysis into beautiful, sensual visual forms, poetry, and a philosophy that she has developed over the course of her career.
Text taken from the 2022 exhibition:
Absolutes and Intermediates at The Shed, New York
I was mostly familiar with Denes’ seminal work Wheatfield – A Confrontation, where she planted and harvested two acres of wheat on the Battery Park landfill in Manhattan, just a few blocks away from Wall Street and the World Trade Center, on land that was worth millions. Over a period of four months in 1982 it called attention to our misplaced priorities and deteriorating human values. Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept and a calling to account. It represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger, and ecological concerns.
Anything important has to be almost invisible. And underrated. So the understructure should be underrated, but strong enough to hold the earth.Agnes Denes
MANIFESTO
working with a paradox
defining the elusive
visualizing the invisible
communicating the incommunicable
not accepting the limitations society has accepted
seeing in new ways
living for a fraction of a second and penetrating light years
using intellect and instinct to achieve intuition
achieving total self-consciousness and self-awareness
being creatively obsessive
questioning, reasoning, analyzing, dissecting and re-examining
understanding the finitude of human existence and still striving
to create beauty and provocative reasoning
finding new concepts, recognizing new patterns
desiring to know the importance or insignificance of existence
seeing reality and still being able to dream
persisting in the eternal search
Agnes Denes, 1970
